While I appreciate that some of you may not care to pay attention to this due to the tawdry and salacious nature of some of the proceedings thus far, there is a larger baseball point to all of it: two highly-leveraged people are fighting over ownership of one of baseball’s marquee teams. The outcome of that battle will almost certainly have a profound impact on the Dodgers’ competitive situation going forward, as well as financial implications for baseball as a whole.

Why? Because if Jamie McCourt wins, and convinces the court that she’s a co-owner, the Dodgers will almost certainly have to be sold in the divorce. At the very least, they will have to be leveraged even more than they already are, thereby choking off cash from the team. What’s more, such a sale would probably occur under distress conditions — there would be a time frame placed on it — thereby lowering the franchise’s market value. Appreciation in franchise market value, by the way, is the single biggest reason anyone buys a baseball team. If that is negatively impacted, owners will start to behave very differently. Probably by cutting payroll and trying to make their teams a better investment from a cashflow perspective as opposed to merely an arbitrage opportunity. In short, this is a big deal.

So come for the wild accusations, but stay for the gravitas. Either way, we plan to keep you apprised of all of the happenings in L’affaire McCourt.

Okay, Craig. I’m going to sit here with my copy of Ivan Boesky’s Merger Mania, the very same book I once used to critique Jason Compson’s cotton market transactions in The Sound and the Fury, and see if it sheds any light on the proceedings in McCourt (which, by the way, could lead to some confusion with Ray Kroc’s former team – McCourt, get it? – oh, alright, never mind. But I tell you what, if I were a Padres public relations factotum competing for the loyalty of the National League fans in that terra incognita between Santa Ana and La Jolla, I would find some way to capitalize on these word-game opportunities).
Otherwise, I will thoroughly enjoy the tawdry and salacious nature of this fiasco, thank you very much. I can’t wait until Jamie McCourt has to admit under oath that all of her kids were actually fathered by Steve Garvey.